by P. J. Sky
The lines ran for as far as she could see, but the balloon was climbing higher into the pale blue sky. Keshia looked back, on to the relative gloom of the deck, and the figures of Ari and the old man. The old man stood in the centre of the deck at a large, spoked wheel. He pulled from his pocket a small, round disc on a chain. He scratched his chin and turned the wheel.
Keshia turned back to the moving vista. Far below, the world spread out like a map, in deep reds, burnt ochres and pastel browns. And it was a silent world. The city of Bo was long gone, the lines of refugees had disappeared, and now there was only the wasteland, flat and infinite, reaching to the horizon and beyond. Keshia could never imagine she would find herself floating towards the stratosphere, as angels might leap from cloud to cloud, the only sound that of the creaking of the lines and the warm breeze that whispered through the canvas awning.
∆∆∆
Keshia slid back down and watched the old man scurry like a beetle across the deck between the various pulleys and switches.
He struggled with a large lever that stuck out at right angles from the deck. “Here’s,” he squawked, like a rough, old bird, “gis us a hand to turn ‘er.”
Ari was looking warily at the old man, and her eyes darted between him and the expanding sky. Her hands were spread out as if she was trying to balance on the gently moving surface of the deck.
Keshia moved to the lever.
“You pull, I’ll push,” said the old man.
Keshia took the lever and they each heaved it round.
The old man wheezed. His arms were thin, his dark skin like leather. He looked up and smiled, baring a single tooth in his upper gum. Within his wizened face, on either side of a hooked nose, his eyes were bright and pale blue like the sky, as if to betray to anyone on the ground the true nature of where he really belonged.
“Nows the ov'er,” he said, hitching his thumb towards a lever on the other side of the deck.
Keshia looked at Ari. Ari rolled her eyes and moved over to the lever. Keshia joined her.
“Out, like that one,” said the old man.
Keshia and Ari heaved it into place. Keshia could see the sweat drip from Ari’s shaven scalp.
The old man moved back to his wheel. He knelt down and pumped a lever back and forth several times and pressed a button. He held the button down and cocked his head.
From beneath the deck, a low, hissing sound grew into a whine and then a splutter and then the machine below their feet roared into life.
The deck began to vibrate.
The old man smiled. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, round disc, attached to a chain. He examined it, then turned the wheel in front of him slightly.
“And,” he said, “we’s on ours way.”
“Are those… the engines?” asked Keshia.
The old man nodded. “You’s can see ‘em if ya likes.” The old man pointed a bony finger towards the edge of the awning. “They’s on each side, jush climb over the canvas.”
Keshia climbed onto the canvas and peered over the edge of the awning.
Just below, the large fan that had unfolded into place now spun so quickly that only its cone-shaped spoke was visible, the blades now only a dark blur. Through them and around them, the land stretched out, vast and flat, in every shade of red imaginable.
There was another loud hissing sound and Keshia jumped. She gripped the edge of the canvas and looked up. Above the deck, an orange flame burnt. The old man relaxed his hand on the rope above and the flame cut out.
Despite the rumble and hiss of the engine it seemed quiet again.
Keshia let her eyes rise up into the vast silver balloon suspended above them. Looking at it she felt giddy again.
Carefully, she moved back down to the metal deck.
“So we fly all the way there?” asked Ari.
The old man held up one bony finger.
“Not all the way,” he said. “But’s as close as we dare. Then I’s sets you down and waits for you’s to return. See’s, in this we can fly right over the war an’ the wasteland.”
Ari pulled at the skin at the back of her neck. “Way I sees it, I ain’t so sure folk are meant to fly like this.”
The old man gently adjusted the wheel. “Some sees it like that. They’s think that folks' feet should stay firmly on the ground. But these folks' focus is all wrong. It’s not about where your feet belong, it’s where your soul belongs. Some folks' souls belong with their feet on the ground, and they’s so sure of it that’s all they’ll ever get. But some folks' souls belong in the stars.”
Ari shook her head. “So wha’ do we call ya?”
The old man grinned. “Ya can jush call me The Cap’in.”
Chapter 6
Beneath the giant balloon, the shadows began to grow longer. Intermittently, the captain would pull on the cable above his head and another burst of flame would bathe the deck in an orange glow. Several times, he reached into his pocket, removed the small, round disc on a chain, and inspected it. Sometimes, he would lightly tap the glass surface of the disc and scratch his chin. Finally, he cut the engines and the balloon drifted onwards, silently into the night.
Ari sat in the shadows on the other side of the deck. Her legs crossed, she drew the blade from its sheath by her ankle and balanced it on her knee. It flashed in the light from the burner.
“I dunno,” she said, “still seems to me if folks were meant to fly, I reckon they’d ‘ave given ‘em wings.”
“An’ tell me,” said the captain, a glint in his eye, “what else we meant to do? Seems to me there’s a lot wrong with this world, but up ‘ere, it all feels a little more right to me.”
Ari shrugged. “World’s what we make it, I ‘spose. Just feel like I’m meant to be closer to the earth is all.”
The captain nodded. “Aye, some folks feel like that.”
Keshia nodded towards the instrument in the captain’s palm. “What’s that?”
“Ahh, this?” He hobbled around the large, spoked wheel and knelt down beside Keshia. “It’s ancient knowledge, this. They’s calls it a compass. Ya see this needle…” he pointed to the thin, red needle in the centre of the instrument. “It always points the same way, more or less, which means we can use it to tell us which way the balloon is goin’.”
“What direction does it point?”
“It mostly always points north.”
“Why does it always point north?”
The old man scratched his chin. “Well, ya see the needle’s magnetic. Ya can fool it with a little bit of the right metal, but otherwise it points towards something very big and very magnetic.”
Keshia folded her arms and hugged her shawl around her. “What could be that magnetic?”
The old man shrugged. “I don’t rightly know. I sometimes wonder if it’s some great abandoned city where there’s so much metal it’s become a sort of beacon, but I don’t know for sure. Once, in my younger days, I tried to find it out. My father had told me of a great frozen place, far, far north. A land of ice, if ya can believe such a thing, and I supposed that maybe that city was there. I took this balloon and travelled north.”
Keshia’s eyes grew. “What happened? Did you find anything?”
The old man’s eyes glinted. “Well now, the finding is all in how ya look at it. See, I didn’t find no land of ice, but I found plenty besides. Great cities, abandoned to the sand, with towers as tall as any you’d find in Alice just poking up out of the dunes. An’ swamps an’ jungles full of all sorts of dangerous creatures like ya wouldn't believe. See, in the rivers there are great green lizards that’d come up outa the water an’ clean swallow ya whole.”
Keshia’s eyes widened. “And you saw them?”
“Yeah, I saw ‘em all right, big as anythin’ ya can imagine. But I tell ya, they ain’t the most deadly creatures you’ll find in that place. Most deadly is the snakes. In the swamp they got a giant, yellow snake an’ the folks livin’ there call it the ghost-squeez
er see, cause it sneaks up on ya while ya sleepin’, quiet as anythin’, so ya’s never get even a chance to wake, an’ it wraps itself all around ya an’ it squeezes.”
Keshia gasped.
The old man clinched his fingers around the compass. “It squeezes the life right outa ya.”
“You can’t have seen all that if you were up here in the balloon.”
“Ahh,” said the old man, “but I’s could. Back then I’s had better eyes ‘an I ‘ave now. Besides, can’t stay in the sky all the time, I’s had to come down sometimes.”
“Then what happened?”
“Well, I kept on goin’ north. The further north I went, the hotter it got, an’ ya think it’s hot ‘ere, but it only gets hotter the further ya go. I came to a great cliff edge an’ the ground fell away an’ I passed into a vast salt plain. It was salt as far as I could see, big an’ flat an’ white an’ goin’ on forever. An’ I kept on going, day after day, week after week, an’ it was just the same, nothin’ but salt. I started to run low on supplies an’ there was nothin’ out there but salt an’ more salt. Nothin’ grows in the salt, see. An’ no folks live there. It was a silent place, no sounds but me an’ the hot wind. Sometimes I’d pass these big, old machines like platforms on legs stickin’ out of the salt, but the people who worked ‘em were long gone. An’ sometimes I passed these giant bleached white skeletons of monstrous creatures that must ‘ave once lived there on the salt; strange creatures with no legs or arms; but they’re all dead now.” The old man’s voice fell. “Everythin’ was dead. The world was white like ice, but hot as the surface of the sun. If I’d ‘ave kept on goin’ I’d ‘ave not come back from that land of the dead. So in the end I turned back.”
The old man fell silent. Finally, Keshia spoke. “Do you wish you’d carried on going north?”
The old man sighed. “Sometimes, in the early mornin’ when my bones ache the most an’ I’m reminded I’m older ‘an I was an’ I wonder about goin’ back an’ finishing what I started. But then I remember, I ain’t so old yet.” The old man grinned. “See, an’ this is the secret of the world. Ya can visit all sorts a’ places, but the world isn’t about places, it’s about the folks that live in it. Once ya see that, the world ain’t so barren ‘an empty as it seems. The world ain’t dead, so why focus on the dead bits? See, it’s the people that make up the world. The people who make it important.”
The full moon emerged over the canopy; a luminous golden disc smeared with patches of silver.
The old man indicted with his finger. “Tis a good omen, a full moon to guide our flight.”
“Can we sail to it?” asked Keshia.
The old man smiled. “Nah, though I’s likes to think we could. You see those grey patches?”
Keshia nodded.
“They’s call those seas.”
“Seas?”
The old man leant closer to Keshia, as if divulging a great secret. “Water. Water like the sand of the desert. Water as far as you could see.”
Keshia scoffed, “Those stories aren’t real.”
In the darkness, the whites of the old man’s eyes glowed. “Yes, ’tis true. An’ once, long ago, people did sail to the moon an’ they’s land in those seas an’ they’s sail them; ’tis true, in the forgotten times.”
“Then why can’t we sail to the moon now?”
The old man shrugged. “Can’t sail high enough in this. Ya go so high an’ then it gets very cold an’ ya can’t breathe. Ya gets sick, ya can’t think straight. Ice gets in ya brain. No, you’d need some mighty ship to sail to the moon, the likes of you an’ I can’t rightly imagine.”
“Like in the moving pictures the pilgrims watch?”
“Pahh,” said the old man. “Movin’ pictures. I don’t believe a world of ‘em. They’s a trick. Maka’s ‘avin us on with ‘em is what I reckons, ‘avin ‘is fun. But…” and he held his finger towards Keshia. “Once a great ship did exist that went to the moon. One bigger ‘an this I reckon. In the forgotten times.”
Keshia imagined the kind of hot air balloons that might be needed to sail all the way to the moon. Up here, it didn’t look so far away now.
“I’d watch the moon closely if I was you,” said the old man. “I’s been watchin’ it, an’ makin’ calculations, as I’s done all my life. Soon, the moon will coincide with the sun.”
“Coincide? Like, it’ll crash into the sun?”
The old man grinned. “Nah, but it don’t happen often. It’ll be really somethin’ to see. It’ll put the fear of Maka into those landlubbers down there.” He grinned to himself as if enjoying this private joke. “I tell ya, they’ll be goin’ crazy when it does.”
∆∆∆
Following the crash, when the local residents from Cooper had looted the crash site for any small component of value that could be sold, recycled or repurposed, a local woman had lifted what had, until recently, been a piece of the curved hull of the forward fuselage. She’d tilted her head and rolled her narrow jaw in the way a kangaroo chewed dry grass. She’d called back to her companions.
“This one’s still breathin’.”
Later, once Janus had woken, a fellow survivor came to see him; an imperial guardsman whose injuries seemed merely superficial, as long as she didn’t miss her depth perception. Where her left eye had been, a dark patch seeped through a grubby bandage.
“Any more news?”
The guardsman shook her head. When she spoke, her voice was sharp and precise. “No Sir, Miss Corinth has still not been found.”
Janus pushed himself up on one elbow and winced. “I understand the locals believe she was taken?”
The guardsman nodded. “Yes Sir, by a group of strangers. They say the strangers arrived in a truck two days ago. Shortly after the aircraft went down, workers on the salt plains say they saw the truck moving in the direction of the crash site. This truck hasn’t been seen since. And Miss Corinth is not among any of the bodies recovered.”
Janus nodded. He looked down towards the empty space where his right foot had only recently been attached. He could still feel his lost toes tingle. He wasn’t going anywhere. Silently, Janus cursed the loss of his foot. He was Starla’s personal bodyguard; he should be out there, hunting her abductors down. His failure to protect her felt deeply personal and seemed to emphasise the ultimate breakdown of their relationship. Starla had left him feeling pathetic.
Why, when it’s good, did it always go so fast?
And their magical time together had gone so very fast. He wasn’t even sure how it had happened or who had made the first move, but once in Starla’s arms, he’d never wanted to leave them. And afterwards, when she’d begun to pull away, he only wanted her more, and only the social boundaries of propriety had stopped him from shouting his love from the top of the tallest tower in the city.
“Should I contact the city?” asked the other guardsman, interrupting his thoughts. “We’ve lost time already.”
It’s unprofessional, thought Janus, to act like a lovesick teenager. I have a station to maintain that has nothing to do with my feelings towards Starla and everything to do with her protection. And it’s now that Starla needs me the most. Physically, I’m no good to her like this, but there are other ways I can help her.
He thought of all the different factions inside the city walls, all vying for power. Between the fall of the Panache family and Titus Corinth’s stroke, a vacuum was forming.
“We need to be careful. This is like the last time all over again, only worse. There are people in the city who could profit from Starla’s… Miss Corinth’s… downfall.”
“Then what do we do, Sir?”
Janus looked around the bed chamber, at the blank, simple walls. From the empty window, the harsh sunlight sliced like a knife through the heavy dust. Where the light hit the floor, the threadbare carpet was stitched into an intricate pattern of reds and browns and greens. This was a simple world, poor maybe, but not one entirely without ingenuity.
�
�Miss Corinth wants to reach out to the people here, on this side of the wall. Perhaps this is how we should proceed. There’s a girl, she helped Miss Corinth before. She’s out here somewhere, in the wasteland. If we could contact her somehow, she might come back to help.”
The other guardsman nodded.
“Look, don’t contact anyone outside the Corinth household. Find some way to contact Corinth’s personal office. They must have someone on the outside that can find her.”
Chapter 7
Keshia woke with a jolt, as if the metal deck had been picked up and thrown back down again. She emerged from her blanket and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. The warm wind scattered red dust across the deck. The morning light had a strange, red tinge, and the air buzzed as it sometimes did when you found yourself stood too close to exposed electrical supply cables.
Ari was standing on the other side of the deck, her right hand gripped to one of the lines. In the centre of the deck, the old man stood at the wheel, elbow hooked between two of its spokes; he looked down a long, brass tube towards the panoramic slot of visible sky. Ahead, the swollen, red clouds bubbled and frothed like the angry contents of a pot about to over-boil.
Beneath her, the deck began to vibrate. It bounced violently and Keshia got to her feet and grabbed hold of one of the lines.
“What’s happening?”
The old man nodded towards the approaching red clouds. “Dust storm, ’tis gonna be a rough one.” He pressed a switch and the engines cut out, their sound replaced by the wind’s canine howl.
“Shouldn’t we turn back?”
The old man shook is head. “Too late for that, an’ we can’t outrun it. Only hope is to go higher.” Above his head, he pulled the cable and the burner hissed into life and glowed a warm orange.
“Can we get above it?”
“I’s ‘spect so. Here, you two give me a hand with these.” He scurried back over to the levers that rotated the fans into place.
